Maverick and Iceman may have had a rocky relationship, but that didn’t stop Tom Cruise from being awestruck by Val Kilmer.
Cruise recently opened up about sharing the screen with Kilmer in the 1986 action movie and its 2022 sequel, Top Gun: Maverick, heaping praise on his powerful performance as Cruise’s onscreen rival.
“First of all, I felt so grateful that he decided to make the film,” Cruise began, telling Sight and Sound magazine in a new cover story that Kilmer needed some convincing. “We did a lot to get him in the movie. Originally, he just didn’t want to make the movie: ‘I don’t want to be a supporting, I want to star in films.’ I was calling his agent, and [director] Tony Scott was hunting him down and meeting in an elevator with Val, and he was like, ‘Please, Val, please.'”
Kilmer eventually came around, signing on to play villain-turned-hero Lt. Tom “Iceman” Kazansky, who ultimately became a wingman for Lt. Pete “Maverick” Mitchell (Cruise) after the tragic death of his best friend, Lt. Nick “Goose” Bradshaw (Anthony Edwards).
While Kilmer did not have the lead role, Cruise argued that he made the most of his scenes, proving what a “great actor” and “charismatic guy” he was.
Paramount Pictures/Sunset Boulevard/Corbis via Getty
Val Kilmer and Tom Cruise in ‘Top Gun’
“What I love about what he did and how he played it [was] he just knew that tone to hit,” Cruise said in the interview, pointing to the original movie’s infamous locker room scene, in which Iceman gnashes his teeth at Maverick. “He had to play it so you wanted these guys to be friends in the end. Do you know what I’m saying? And I remember those scenes like they were yesterday, acting with him, where he did the bite thing.”
He continued, “When you’re acting with somebody and you just see they’re just on fire, it’s exhilarating. I love when the scene just goes to a different place. If you look at Top Gun, I think he’s in the movie maybe 10 minutes. That’s the impact of an artist like that.”
Cruise added that Kilmer brought that same level of charisma to set nearly four decades later, when the costars reunited for the film’s sequel. “It was amazing being on set for Top Gun: Maverick because it was like time had not passed,” Cruise said of his relationship with Kilmer. “We were laughing and it was joyous. And then we started acting and it’s just, you see it… he became Iceman.”
“The power that this guy has, even not saying anything, to become that character,” Cruise said. “You see how even the sniff that he gave, he was Iceman. And you saw the dynamic between these friends. It was very special, to say the least, for me personally.”
In a pivotal scene in the sequel, Maverick turned to Iceman for advice, revealing that his old competitor and frenemy has since become a dear friend and risen through the ranks to become Admiral Kazansky, the commander of the U.S. Pacific Fleet. The conversation between them marks an emotional turning point — though Iceman delivers just a single line of dialogue due to an illness that eventually takes his life (Kilmer himself had trouble speaking after his battle with throat cancer).
Paramount Pictures
Tom Cruise and Val Kilmer in ‘Top Gun: Maverick’
“He didn’t even have to speak,” Cruise recalled. “That’s what he’s able to do. Beautiful, really beautiful. A gift that he had and that he shared with all of us.”
Kilmer died at 65 on April 1. Days later, Cruise paid tribute to his late costar with an emotional moment of silence at CinemaCon in Las Vegas.
“I’d like to honor a dear friend of mine, Val Kilmer,” Cruise told the crowd at the start of his Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning presentation on April 3. “I really can’t tell you how much I admired his work, how much I thought of him as a human, and how grateful and honored I was when he joined [the] first Top Gun and came back for Top Gun: Maverick. He gave a lot to all of us with his performances.”
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Top Gun: Maverick would be Kilmer’s final onscreen appearance. He spoke highly of acting alongside Cruise while unpacking their powerful scene with Entertainment Weekly. “Coming back to work with Tom more than 30 years later, it was like no time had passed at all,” Kilmer told EW at the time of the movie’s release. “Being next to him instantly makes you better. That said, we blew a lot of takes laughing so much. It was really fun — really special.”
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